It’s been three years without any new release of our venerable time tracking tool, PhpReport. It doesn’t mean the project has been still during all this time; despite the slower development pace, you will find more than 80 patches in the repository since the last release, which account for 45 fixes or small features in the project.
It’s time to gather them all in a new release, PhpReport 2.16. These are the highlights:
CSV export
All reports have now an option to export data to CSV, so they can be imported into other software. This was made with spreadsheets in mind, and I can confirm it works perfectly with our dear LibreOffice Calc.
Quick-access buttons
Most reports got quick-access buttons added for the most common time periods: current and previous week, current month and year, etc.
Smarter “copy from yesterday”
The “copy from date” feature allows to copy tasks from a certain date into the current one. Its main use case is to copy everything from your previous work day, because you probably have been doing the same work, more or less during the same timetable… You can conveniently copy the tasks and just add some tweaks. The default date to copy from used to be the previous day, but you don’t usually want to copy your tasks from Sunday to Monday! Now it defaults to the previous date you have worked.
Nit-picking
Addressed several slightly annoying behaviors to make the application more enjoyable to use. For example, when you create a project, the grid will scroll automatically to the newly added project so you can keep editing the project attributes. A similar thing happens when you have some row selected in the accumulated hours report and you load a new set of dates: the previously selected row will be kept selected and visible. Opening the project details from a report now pops up a new window so your report remains untouched when you go back to it. Inexplicably small grids now use all the screen space, and we increased the consistency among the different edition screens.
Moved to GitHub
The project sources, releases and the information previously available in the project website has been moved to GitHub, so any potential contributors will find a familiar environment if they happen to be interested in PhpReport.
Future
I’ve bumped the version number from 2.1 straight to 2.16. The intention is to make one release per year, to guarantee some predictability regarding how and when the changes in the repository will arrive to users. You can expect PhpReport 2.17 releasing in March next year; it may look like a long time but I think it’s reasonable for a project with a low level of activity.
Looking for help!
Igalia has recently announced open positions in our Coding Experience program, and one of them is aimed to work in PhpReport. We have many ideas to improve this tool to make it more productive and powerful. Check the conditions of the program in the website if you are interested!